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Sexting as Do-It-Yourself Porn

Even before Web browsers, personal pages and online video, adults and teenagers did everything from cross-dressing and flirting to participating in sexually suggestive chat rooms and virtual worlds. Creators of the once popular Second Life platform built a separate teenager grid partly because of concerns about the sexually charged content adults produced in the original grid.

Just as digital media has allowed people to customize the content they stream, it has also allowed them to customize their personal and sexual fantasies.

The recent revelations about the sexting practices of Anthony Weiner illustrate how the courtship rituals, flirtation habits and sexual desires of adults are evolving in the digital age. Just as digital media allows us to customize the content we stream, it also allows us to customize our own personal and sexual fantasies.

The ubiquity of cameras and video, as well as the fascination with watching ourselves, has led to a do-it-yourself aesthetic in our sexual lives. Pocket-size cameras allow us to snap a private photo and share it instantly with anyone in the world. Video-based platforms like Skype can take adult fascination with phone sex to another level. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can blur the lines between our private and public selves while also appealing to the voyeur in all of us.

Is all of this technology giving new meaning to the notion of do-it-yourself porn? While I’m not convinced that the raunchy behavior online is equivalent to porn, sexting certainly reveals how our sexual norms and the expression of our sexual selves are evolving in ways that make all of us — adolescents and adults — vulnerable.